Summary:The speaker of Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues" describes
an evening of listening to a blues musician in Harlem. With its diction,
its repetition of lines and its inclusion of blues lyrics, the poem evokes
the mournful tone and tempo of blues music and gives readers an appreciation
of the state of mind of the blues musician in the poem.

Relationship Between Speaker and Subject:Lines
1-3 create what grammarians call a "dangling modifier," a sentence
logic problem wherein the clauses preceding the main subject and verb of the
sentence ("Droning a drowsy syncopated tune," and "Rocking
back and forth to a mellow croon," which precede "I heard")
don't most logically refer to the subject of the sentence ("I").
Has Hughes simply made a grammatical error? Probably not. Rather,
he's using his sentence structure there to show the relationship between the
singer and the audience, the dual effect of the music on the performer and
on the listener. The singer is droning and swaying as he performs, but
so is the audience as it listens, thus they become conflated grammatically
in the sentence that describes their interaction. Here, then, Hughes suggests
that the blues offer a sort of communal experience, that they express the
feelings of not only the artist, but the whole community.

"Down on Lenox Avenue":Lenox Avenue
is a main street in Harlem, which in terms of the geography of New York, is
North, or uptown. We might wonder why Hughes has written "down
on Lenox Avenue" rather than "up on Lenox Avenue." Let's
think, then, about the identity of the speaker of the poem. Because
Harlem was home mainly to African Americans and the parts of New York City
south of Harlem (referred to as "downtown") were populated mainly
by whites, if the speaker were to perceive Lenox Avenue as "up"
from his place of origin, we might assume that he is white. During the
20s and 30s, writings by African-Americans about black identity and culture
proliferated. This exceptionally fruitful period of extensive and brilliant
literary production is referred to as a "renaissance." During the
Harlem Renaissance, African American artists and musicians also gained recognition
and currency in the white community; many wealthy whites, who generally lived
downtown, took a strong interest in the cultural activity there, in Harlem
nightlife and in its artistic productions. Flocking northward to Harlem,
where most African Americans lived, for the entertainment and introduction
to new forms of music and art produced by African Americans there, white benefactors
of these artists helped them to become known beyond their own community. But
some of these patrons also threatened the autonomy and commercial viability
of these emerging black artists, sometimes taking advantage of current racial
attitudes and the discriminatory laws and social codes to exploit black musicians
and artists for their own financial benefit.

So when Hughes's speaker says he was "down on Lenox Avenue" we can
assume that he is not white. Why does it matter whether we see this
speaker as white or black? Certainly, people of all races have experienced
the blues (both the music and the feelings) and musicians of all colors have
played blues music. But jazz and blues music must be considered original
to African Americans, borne out of "the irrestistible impulse of blacks
to create boldly expressive art of a high quality as a primary response to
their social conditions, as an affirmation of their dignity and humanity in
the face of poverty and racism" (Norton Anthology of African American
Literature 929). One can see this important idea in lines 9 and
16: "With his ebony hands on each ivory key" and "Coming
from a black man's soul." The image of black hands on white keys
suggests the way in which black musicians have taken an instrument of white
Western culture and through it produced their own artistic expression.
Steven C. Tracy writes the following about this idea:

All
the singer seems to have is his moaning blues, the revelation of "a black
man's soul," and those blues are what helps keep him alive. Part of that
ability to sustain is apparently the way the blues help him keep his identity.
Even in singing the blues, he is singing about his life, about the way that
he and other blacks have to deal with white society. As his black hands touch
the white keys, the accepted Western sound of the piano and the form of Western
music are changed. The piano itself comes to life as an extension of the singer,
and moans, transformed by the black tradition to a mirror of black sorrow
that also reflects the transforming power and beauty of the black tradition.
Finally, it is that tradition that helps keep the singer alive and gives him
his identity, since when he is done and goes to bed he sleeps like an inanimate
or de-animated object, with the blues echoing beyond his playing, beyond the
daily cycles, and through both conscious and unconscious states. (Langston
Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.)

In this interpretation of blues music as an expression of black sorrow and
struggle in the face of oppressive and discriminatory forces of the larger
society, we can see a clear connection to the character of Sonny in James
Baldwin's Sonny's Blues.Sonny and his family have been worn down by many years
of struggle against racism and discrimination; the story of Sonny's uncle's
death and Sonny's father's lifelong struggle to come to terms with that death
represent this struggle.

The word "down" might also refer to the architecture of Harlem,
with its multi-storied apartment buildings looking down on the avenues, where
the ground floors of buildings housed businesses and people lived in apartments
on the upper floors. "Down" might also refer to the emotional
content of the music the speaker will describe. Here we can see another
connection to Sonny's Blues. Remember when the narrator, standing at
the subway in Harlem, says to Sonny's friend, "You come all the way down
here just to tell me about Sonny?" Also, notice the implicit opposition
between the sorrows of the singer that bring him down and his desire to quit
his "frownin" and "put [his] troubles [up] on the shelf."

Raggy:Hughes uses the word "raggy"
in line 13. "Raggy" is not an actual word; perhaps we might
interpret it as a combination of word "raggedy" meaning tattered
or worn out and the word "ragtime" which refers to a style of
jazz music characterized by elaborately syncopated rhythm in the melody
and a steadily accented accompaniment. When we thing of something that is
"raggedy," we think of rags, poverty and need. But we also
think of the idea of patchwork, a fabric constructed out of scraps of cloth
-- or rags -- sewn together to make a new whole out of disparate parts,
such as a quilt. Music can be patchwork, too, and if you listen
to jazz, blues and folk music, you will hear different threads or trends
patched together in the music. African American blues music itself is a
patching together of different and disparate influences (see above Steven
C. Tracy's ideas about the way African Americans made a "white"
Western instrument speak of their particular emotions).

Another African American
art form, quilting, uses the same principle of patching to produce works
of both practical and artistic value. See Alice Walker's short story
"Everyday Use" to understand the importance of the folk arts and
quilting in the African American experience.

Syncopated:
a shift of accent in a musical composition that occurs when a normally weak
beat is stressed; when an expected rhythm is modified in an unexpected way.
Syncopation in music might be analogous to situational irony in literature
when something other than what would be expected or logical happens.